So I have a playlist with a bunch of albums in it that I would like to sort by album name. This is mostly fine, except where you have two albums from different artists that have the same album name, such as here:
Note that 'Aphex Twin - Classics' and 'Ratatat - Classics' are being merged together.

This is in Album List view, sorting by Album. Album by Artist does not work as it primary sorts alphabetically by Artist instead of alphabetically by Album, which is what I want.

What I would expect to see here is 'Aphex Twin - Classics' first and then 'Ratatat - Classics', because iTunes should know that it has two albums but from different artists.

It looks like you can can set the 'Album Artist' in the id3 tags and it will then sort by that, which means to make this work correctly I'd have to retag all my music and copy the artist into the artist album tag (unless it already existed yadda yadda). This is less than ideal, is there another way?

(Thinking about this I'm imagine it happens because of how iTunes tries to deal with compilations, which imo really needs to be overhauled, but that's another story)

1 Answer
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I believe that currently the only way to do this is by setting the Album Artist. Considering that you only need to set the Album Artist for albums that you are having problems with, and that you only need to copy and paste the artist name once for each album, it doesn't seem very tedious.

Actually, if I were to be pedantic about this you have to set it for all albums involved, if you just set it for Ratatat and not for Aphex Twin Ratatat will be above Aphex Twin, which is the incorrect order.Not that that really matters, it's just kind of revolting to have to modify my tags to work around iTunes' shortcomings.
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SCdFOct 12 '10 at 11:40

Correct, you have to set it for all albums involved. What I meant is that you do not need to go about setting it for the noninvolved albums, which form the vast majority of your iTunes library.
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sentinelOct 12 '10 at 12:02